Backend Engineer - Mimir

As a Mimir Engineer you'll join one of two sub-squads, Ingest or Query, that together maintain the open source Grafana Mimir OSS project and operate Grafana Cloud Metrics across three major cloud providers. This role offers the opportunity to work on large-scale, high-performance distributed systems where efficiency, resilience, and reliability are essential to keeping our metrics offerings competitive and smooth at massive volumes.

Mimir engineers work across a variety of streams. You'll typically collaborate with another engineer on a larger project while also driving performance and reliability improvements identified from operating the system in production. In this role, you'll write and review PRs and design documents, help guide automated release rollouts, and participate in the on-call rotation for the systems you own. This is a chance to directly shape, optimize, and scale one of the industry's most advanced metrics platforms.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
• Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve.
• Drive projects from initial idea all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers
• Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team's scope
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability
• Be a part of your team's follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you're running
• Support other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team
• Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system

• Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively

• Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a squad. You'll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must.

• Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well

• Some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer's hands in a self-driven way

• Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering

• Some experience with being on-call and following the DevOps model

• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others

• Familiarity with observability systems, know when to use metrics, logs, traces, to debug a problem.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience working with Kubernetes
• Experience working with queue systems, e.g. the Kafka protocol
• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn
• Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code

In Germany, the Base compensation range for this role is EU 97,000 - EU 121,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo). We're scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do. You may not meet every requirement, and that's okay. If this role excites you, we'd love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.